Love Thine Imaginary Friend
by wirbil
Summary: Maka had an imaginary friend named Soul. He had white hair, red eyes, sharp teeth, and a smile that was very feral and very, very inviting. -SoulxMaka- AU


**Disclaimer: Soul Eater solely belongs to Atsushi Okubo. **

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Maka had an imaginary friend. His name was Soul. His full name was Soul Eater Evans and only she could see him. She liked him. Soul had white hair, red eyes, and pointy teeth when he smiled, and he was always hungry too. Mama and Papa had just split when she first began seeing him. He had just appeared at her breakfast table one morning and when she tried to point him out to Mama, Mama had just smiled and said that she was seeing things. Maka got the feeling that Mama was hiding something but didn't push. (Mama could see Soul, Maka didn't know that though.)

That was until she met Black Star (that's really his name) and Tsubaki. Tsubaki was _his_ imaginary friend and until he met Maka he thought only he could see her. Maka saw her too. Black Star (yes, that _is_ his really name) saw Soul too. Maka and Black Star (seriously, that is his real name) thought they were the only ones who could see their imaginary friends.

Then they met Death the Kid (no, don't look so incredulous, this is his real name) who had two imaginary friends, Liz and Patty. Maka and Black Star saw them and Kid saw Soul and Tsubaki. Kid knew more about the imaginary friends and why only some people saw them but he was only a kid like his name so he couldn't answer in detail all the questions Maka and Black Star had. His honorable father could see them as well. The seven of them became close friends.

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Grade school was boring.

Maka didn't really like the other kids in her class. They were loud and nosy and dirty and she couldn't understand it when the teacher gave her funny looks when she was inside reading one of the encyclopedias. Even the encyclopedias were childish! They had stupid pictures and stupid ways of expressing something. She liked the encyclopedias Papa had in his study better. Of, course she'd never tell him that.

The boys were like Soul. They were grubby looking and always wiped their noses on their hands. They were icky. She didn't like them.

Soul was loud and nosy too but Maka liked to think that Soul was special; Soul was _different _(in a very good way).

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Middle school was awkward. (Two words: Puberty and PMS. See how they both start with "P"? Let's not forget pimples! Those also start with "P"!)

Maka had hormones raging through her system. She had to squish some _unnecessary_ thoughts about Soul.

She covered it up by thinking it was getting rather juvenile to have an imaginary friend tailing her these days. Soul seemed to understand and now he didn't come out of the house much. He lagged about when she came home and she made up for it by telling him about her day and explaining her homework too him.

She stopped seeing him around as much (in reality). Then she started _dreaming_ about him.

In her dreams the two of them were always in formal wear. They were in a dark and classy room with and piano and a loveseat. She was always wearing heels and a dress and he was always in a suit. Her hair was down sometimes and up other times and her dress varied, but Soul was always in a black suit with a white button down shirt. Sometimes his ties were different. He was always handsome.

Maka wasn't interested in any of the guys in any of her classes. They didn't really have a chance against Soul in a suit. His features were sharpening and his hair was growing so that instead of standing straight up in spikes, his hair had begun to droop in a way that was the epitome of cute (er…cool…she meant _cool_). As far as she knew, Soul didn't go through an awkward adolescence stage of life.

It was nice to have a place and time where and when you could just relax and smell the roses. Or as Soul would say the dust, because he was the kind of guy that believed roses are not naturally part of air whereas dust had a high probability of being in the air.

In that dark room they would dance or talk. Dancing was just swaying to some unsung beat with her head on his chest and her arms woven around his neck while his hands rested around her waist. Talking was mostly her hitting him and him coming back with smart comments, which led to her hitting him some more.

Soul played the piano. Maka was surprised to find that he played it (really, really) well. His fingers were long and agile and sometimes he pulled her down onto his piano bench next to him and showed her some of the notes and taught her simple songs and coached her with some sheet music that which he kept inside the hollow bench. By the time Maka reached high school she was proficient at the piano.

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High school was painful.

Maka was painfully lonely and getting by was just painfully bothersome.

It was lonely because she didn't have many friends. To be honest she didn't really want any but that's not the point. The people whom she understood were best described as _eccentric_ and the people whom she didn't understand were so far away on the social status scale for her to even care about talking to them. They were just going to ignore her anyway.

Bothersome because she really didn't care for any of the (very few) boys that came and asked her on dates. Thus meaning she never went to any of the dances and she never attended prom. What was point if you didn't have a date? What was the point of having a relationship if you had meetings with your white haired, red-eyed imaginary friend in your dreams that the guy in you waking moments could never compare to?

Soul and Maka didn't dance now. Things were beyond a little awkward silence. They sat on either sides of the loveseat and just _sat there_. She didn't want to dance and he never played the piano anymore. She missed the music that his clever fingers made. She sometimes sat in front of the piano and fiddled with tunes that never seemed to express what she wanted them too. He watched her.

Soul had gotten very good looking. It wasn't fair. He had fine silvery hair, ruby eyes that seemed to pierce hearts, and a smile that was feral and (very, very) inviting. He didn't smile much these days.

If everyone could see him, Maka knew that he would be one of those guys that had to _hide_ from the girls who were trailing him and forcing themselves upon him. Maka also knew he was the kind of guy that would say it was uncool to be uncompassionate to girls, so he would try and nicely tell them that he wasn't interesting. At least she thought he wasn't interested.

Thank goodness only she and six other people (that she knew of) could see him. (Whew!)

---*---

College was mind-blowing.

Maka was free! Sometimes she still thought of little inconsequential things but most of the time it was just work, work, and more work. She must graduate at the top of her class!

Soul was her only distraction. Things were getting even worse between them. He barely visited now and he only came now and then into her dreams. She missed him.

That's pretty much how she spent her time at college. Nothing happened that was dramatic or exciting or sad. She just…went through college. Was that saying too little?

---*---

She was twenty-four now. Maka was all grown up. She had a job as a weapons developer like her mother. At the facility she worked, people like her were called weapon technicians but Maka never really that the name was an accurate description of her and her coworkers.

Maka found weapons fascinating. How do you make a weapon that has firepower and is absolutely deadly in combat or any other situation while making it easy enough to be operated by a regular ground soldier? How do you make a weapon that only requires two days of training and classes to operate it while making sure that weapon can withstand the power blast of a grenade and still shoot a round per minute? It's a puzzle and Maka intended to solve it. She loved puzzles.

Her meetings with Soul are rare. She catches glimpses of him from the corner of her eye when they sit stiffly on the loveseat. He's gorgeous. He really is. Not in a male model kind of way (which is very intimidating) but a simple kind of elegance seems to radiate from him. His features have sharpened and he looks more alert and much (much, much, more) mature. Soul has high cheekbones, long lashes, and hair that looked disorderly and carefully combed at the same time. Maybe he was just really bad at styling hair. All the images in her waking moments of him are fragmented. Maka knows that these little glimpses don't do him justice.

Her father has recently offered her to join an organization called Shibusen. He works there as a field technician who tries out weapons.

Maka never expected to see Soul hanging out at a shooting range at Shibusen being given tips about how to shoot a nano tech filled poison dart by her father.

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It turns out that all "imaginary friends" double as weapons. They pair up with children when they're young and the ones who keep their imaginary friends come to Shibusen to hone their skills at the art of "soul collection" because that's what the original imaginary friend was formed for. At Shibusen they're called "weapons". Maka thinks that this is degrading, at first. Then she realizes that this is just a technical term for what Soul and his kind are and that most of the people like her just call them _partners_ or by name.

It's nice to be in a place where everyone knows _what_ everyone else is even if they don't know _who_ they are.

---*---

Maka (sort of) works at Shibusen. She sees Soul frequently and she was right about the fangirls comment that she thought of in high school. He always smiles politely and says he's not interested. She's jealous. Maka is really, really, uber jealous. She see's him so often now that she knows that he really _is_ gorgeous. Not just to her, but to _a lot_ of people.

She met Black Star and Tsubaki again. It was nice talking to them. They're expecting their first child in a few months. Tsubaki had always been pretty but she glowed as an expecting mother. Black Star has grown taller than her now. It's an odd feeling looking at the two of them. Maka gets a funny feeling in her gut when she congratulates them.

Maka also met Death the Kid, Liz, and Patty again. She senses a love triangle but the three seem to be stuck at the friendship stage. Love triangles only hurt if you don't like each other. The three of them care for each other too deeply to hurt another in their beautifully twisted asymmetrical love polygon.

She feels like she's alone. Soul visited her once. Years of pent up hormones caught up with her that afternoon. The two of them ended up horizontal on her couch, and Maka was pretty sure that Souls shirt was somewhere in her living room. She just didn't know where. He had apologized profusely and told her that he was really sorry about what happened. Maka certainly wasn't.

Souls visits in her dreams became more frequent (and steamier). The tension was palpable and anyone could have _sliced_ through it. They danced, talked, played the piano but it all felt a little stiff. After a whole week of dreams like that Maka finally pressed herself close to him one day while they were dancing and kissed Soul until he was reduced to one syllable words because he needed convincing she was fine about what happened that afternoon (not that she was beyond one syllable words herself).

These days their kisses were often and the time in between each wasn't nearly as long as Maka thought they were. Sometimes, if she ran her tongue across her teeth she could almost imagine the way her imaginary friend (who was no longer imaginary because everyone could see him after he spent a night doing some activities with her…) tasted.

Everything about him always lingered in her mind. Even if he was just a classroom away teaching the new weapons of Shibusen the reason that only certain people could see them and why they were here in the first place.

Maka liked to think that _love_ was what kept these imaginary friends close to their miesters after all this time.

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**A/N: I was listening to the Soul Eater OST and this hit me in the head. XD I adore SoulxMaka.**


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